By the Numbers

Kansas imprisons fewer juveniles than ever before, but sharp racial disparities stubbornly persist.

This odyssey – where the juvenile justice corrections system selects and collects youth in facilities -- eventually will figuratively incarcerate youth in smothering debt. But first, it incarcerates them literally. Kansas children and young adults as well as their families pay a host of fees derived from their stays in prisons, from their court dates, from their urinalysis lab fees, penalties for nonpayment, restitution to victims, late fees, calculated interest, and more.

There’s bad news, as well as some progress.

Kansas corrections officials tout reductions in juvenile incarceration following legislative reform efforts but continue to confront ugly racial disparities. According to a 2019 report from the Kansas Department of Corrections, the state has seen a 24 percent decline in the number of incarcerated youths in the aftermath of legislative reforms. In fact, the state closed one of the two youth prisons in the state.

Despite those gains, however, the report said racial disparities persist. In 2018, according to the report, Black youth were three times more likely than white youth to be arrested, nearly six times more likely to be detained, and more than seven times more likely to be “detained in secure confinement.”

Asked about those disparities, Department of Corrections Spokesman David Thompson said the answer to that conundrum could only be found upstream from prisons.

“We believe this question would be more appropriately answered by the state’s prosecutors and court system than of the Kansas Department of Corrections,” Thompson said in an email exchange.

Thompson said the DOC envisions helping all youth committed to its custody, including youth of color, receive the education, programming, and/or treatment necessary to equip them to be successful on their return to their communities.

State corrections officials have called for still more reform, according to the report.

“To reduce these disparities, Kansans United for Youth Justice recommends that Kansas law enforcement and youth corrections agencies partner with justice-involved youth and their families to guide reform; revise laws and policies to address the disparate racial impact; develop accountability and compliance mechanisms for law enforcement, and incorporate implicit bias training for law enforcement, court services, judges, jurors, and all those involved with the juvenile justice system.”

As the numbers here in Kansas suggest, young, Black males garner more than their share of attention for behaviors excused for youth who are white.

This happens everywhere Black children exist.

Some youth will arrive at facilities with a fair amount of debt from hearings and court appearances, and any time spent on probation, but they get more helpings of debt heaped on them once entering. They will leave those institutions imprisoned by still more unwieldy debt. And because of those racial disparities, the youth of color who could least afford any additional debt, seem to have the most debt stacked on top of them.

This level of incarceration isn’t cheap, and the network of fines and fees were ostensibly meant to help offset those costs.

Kansas spends $134,000 a year for each youth at the Kansas Juvenile Correction Complex in Topeka. That’s essentially $368 a day, per youth.

On any given day nation-wide, nearly 60,000 youth under age 18 are incarcerated in juvenile jails and prisons in the United States. These rates vary widely. But in every state, confining young people – cutting them off from their families, disrupting their educations, and often exposing them to further trauma and violence – harms their development and has lifelong negative consequences.

Our system for dealing with juvenile crime remains beset by many of the same issues that exist in the adult system including but not limited to sexual abuse, criminal activity, punishment isolation and much more. Our system seems heavily calibrated for punishment rather than restorative rehabilitation.

Youth in juvenile facilities may suffer from substance abuse, mental illness, sexual abuse but the system seems to respond only to criminality and not to the trauma that may have triggered such behavior. “There’s a proven link between abuse and neglect of children in cases of juvenile delinquency,” said the website, Lawinfo.com

We shackle children in our system, sometimes at their wrists, their waists, their ankles. They get strip searched. They endure physical attacks from other residents as well as from guards. But we seem mystified that problems inside our system persist.

Those 2016 reforms – reforms undertaken at the legislative level that lowered the number of youths in state custody – wrought some welcomed results.

For example, Kansas has significantly reduced youth incarceration for technical violations. In 2019, only five percent of new incarceration admissions were for technical violations. In 2015, 68 percent of youth admissions were for technical violations.

Also, the report said that the number of youths incarcerated in juvenile correction facilities in Kansas declined by 52 percent between 2010 and 2019. During this same period, the number of youths in juvenile custody (out-of-home placements, foster care, home treatment, psychiatric residential treatment centers, etc.) dropped 88 percent. Also, the number of youths on intensive probation declined 49 percent.

“Kansas has worked to align our juvenile justice system with evidence-based practices for justice-involved youth,” Thompson said. “As a state, we are reinvesting more resources in communities to divert youth from deeper system involvement.”

But while some of the numbers trended in a good direction, some of the figures inside these numbers represent a cause for alarm.

In 2019, for example, 52 percent of youth “prioritized for incarceration” were assessed as “high risk.” In 2013, 99 percent of youth admitted to JCFs were assessed as low or moderate risk. In 2019, 48 percent were assessed as low or moderate risk.

Also of concern, by 2019, 45 percent of assessed youth admitted to JCFs were assessed as “Behavioral Health Level 3 or requiring an individualized treatment plan involving mental health contacts at least monthly. No youths were assessed as Behavioral Health Level 4, which would indicate a serious disorder.

Now that we’ve seen just how effective reforms can be, we must envision and build a system that better serves youth, their families and helps them return to their communities to be better able to navigate society.